corrupt Excel files on AFP share

[Kolargol00]

Hello everyone!

I have a nasty problem in my lab since a few months: some Excel files
cannot be opened.

When one double-clicks on one of these files, it opens (Quartz animation),
Excel comes in the foreground and briefly displays an "opening file..."
progress bar. But after that nothing else happens: no window, no error
message, no nothing... This inability to open files or corruption doesn't
affect every Excel documents we have, only some of them with no apparent
reason. The lack of an error message makes this problem awfully hard to
investigate. I have not been able to reproduce this corruption purposedly.
It happened to me once: I opened an Excel worksheet modified some values,
saved and closed it. I re-opened it just after but the file would not open
anymore.

These files are all stored on a Linux server running Netatalk 2.0 (see
http://netatalk.sf.net/) to share volumes with the Macs. I investigated on
the Linux side, the filesystem is clean and even OpenOffice cannot manage
to open these corrupt files. We are using MacOS X 10.3 and MS Office X
(Excel version 10.1.5). I tried to upgrade to Excel 10.1.6 but the problem
still persists.

Why do these files get corrupted?
How can I restore them?
What else can I test?

Thanks for your help and regards,
Etienne

 

[J Laroche]

Kolargol00 wrote on 2005/02/24 09:23:

Hello everyone!

I have a nasty problem in my lab since a few months: some Excel files
cannot be opened.

When one double-clicks on one of these files, it opens (Quartz animation),
Excel comes in the foreground and briefly displays an "opening file..."
progress bar. But after that nothing else happens: no window, no error
message, no nothing... This inability to open files or corruption doesn't
affect every Excel documents we have, only some of them with no apparent
reason. The lack of an error message makes this problem awfully hard to
investigate. I have not been able to reproduce this corruption purposedly.
It happened to me once: I opened an Excel worksheet modified some values,
saved and closed it. I re-opened it just after but the file would not open
anymore.

These files are all stored on a Linux server running Netatalk 2.0 (see
http://netatalk.sf.net/) to share volumes with the Macs. I investigated on
the Linux side, the filesystem is clean and even OpenOffice cannot manage
to open these corrupt files. We are using MacOS X 10.3 and MS Office X
(Excel version 10.1.5). I tried to upgrade to Excel 10.1.6 but the problem
still persists.

Why do these files get corrupted?
How can I restore them?
What else can I test?

Thanks for your help and regards,
Etienne

Could the workbooks be hidden? Can you make them appear with Window/Unhide ?

JL
Mac OS X 10.3.8, Office v.X 10.1.6

 

[Kolargol00]

Could the workbooks be hidden? Can you make them appear with Window/Unhide
?

I don't think they are hidden. There is no new entry in the Window menu.

Regards,
Etienne

 

[Southwick]

Under the window menu, if "Unhide" is not greyed out, then you have hidden
workbooks. They will not show up in the window list until they are unhidden.
Dave

 

[Kolargol00]

Under the window menu, if "Unhide" is not greyed out, then you have hidden
workbooks. They will not show up in the window list until they are
unhidden. Dave

All entries of the window menu are greyed out except "bring everything to
front" (rough translation from the french version).

I have managed to reproduce the "corruption" on the Linux server. It is
strange because it does not affect all Excel files. Apparently the most
complicated/large ones are better targets. This phenomenon seems not to
happen on MacOS X servers (I set up and tried one this afternoon).

Does anyone have a clue regarding why this problem does not affect all
Excel files?

Regards,
Etienne